Key Takeaways from Huawei’s APAC Innovation Day

Huawei’s Asia Pacific Innovation Day took place in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia this year. The keynotes covered some interesting themes from all around the ecosystem focussing on Huawei’s Digital Transformation projects in this region. It was nice to learn how Huawei is collaborating with the entire ecosystem to work on the infrastructure behind smart cities, digital economies and even mobile AI. Here are 7 key takeaways from the APAC Innovation day.

1. Huawei is building the infrastructure for new technologies for an intelligent world

Intelligent world with devices sensing and serving content to consumers, connectivity with smart networks and the cloud processing all the big data with the help of AI. This is going to be a base for the next generations of Digital Transformation.

2. ICT will help achieve economic goals

Industry 4.0, smart tourism, smart education and smart city are key areas where Digital Transformation is being applied. This will lead to significant growth of the economies in Asia.

3. The four layers of Digital Transformation

With the foundation layer being ICT infrastructure topped with security which is key for development. Industrial digitization supports an environment for new technology. It is managed by a Digital Brain which is the highest and most advanced stage.

4. Malaysia is targeting Digital economy to provide for 20% of it’s GDP by 2020

The deputy Prime Minister of Malaysia announced that they will be banking on smart city projects, SMEs and other Digital Transformation projects to grow they Digital Economy.

5. Public Safety is an important area of focus around Smart City projects

With the network infrastructure being able to manage transmission of high resolution video, through image processing techniques it is possible to keep track of people & specific vehicles. This can drastically bring down crime rates.

6. The Digital Economy is rapidly growing worldwide

The worldwide Digital Economy is now worth US $11.5 trillion! That is about 15.5% of the world’s total GDP. The growth can be regarded to the convergence of IoT, Broadband, Analytics, AI & the cloud. With Digital investments providing 6.7x the ROI than non-digital investments.

Huawei’s latest smartphone release- the Mate 10 has a built in AI processor that is allowing offline translations, proactive recommendations, contextual experiences, better selfies and real-time object recognition. With the AI processing happening on the phone, these AI powered features are faster and maintain complete user data privacy. Apart from that, with an open API for the AI processor, 3rd party apps can take advantage of it as well.

At the event, Huawei also announced a new OpenLab in Malaysia that will drive Digital Transformation in the APAC region. It was interesting to see how Huawei is working with the Malaysian government and other solution partners to transform Kuala Lumpur to a smart-city.

For further reading, here is an infographic on Huawei’s numbers.

The thoughts and opinions expressed here are my own, I am not paid to write about them. Huawei does invite me for some events as a Key Opinion Leader.